When the woman gets pregnant, she is like playing a crossword puzzle. It involves a lot of changes in her physical and emotional health. In fact, it is very difficult to discern the positive signs of pregnancy. There are actually three categories on the signs and symptoms of pregnancy. Among the different signs are presumptive, [...]
Tuesday (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), yours truly noted an email from the Associated Press's Images Group which encouraged subscribing outlets to use its "iconic images and videos" to promote the 85th birthday of Fidel Castro, the "Legendary Cuban revolutionary and longtime leader."
Today, writing what may be the wire service's last calendar-driven excuse to heap praise on him while he is still alive, the AP's Peter Orsi described Cuban dictator Castro as a "revolutionary icon" with an "outsize persona," who in his prime was "a gregarious public speaker," and while in retirement remains a "prolific writer."
To the AP's Orsi, Castro is not a dictator; he's an "aging leader." To Venezuelan authoritarian Hugo Chavez, who is in Cuba attempting a recovery from what reportedly is cancer, Castro is not a fellow oppressor; he is a "longtime friend and political mentor." There's no direct reference to the island's miserable conditions; just once does Orsi mention feeble attempts at "reforms" which might "save the island's economy by loosening some state control."
For readers who can stand it, here are excerpts:
Castro turns 85 quietly but still a force in Cuba
Revolutionary icon Fidel Castro marked his 85th birthday behind closed doors Saturday as the aging leader famous for railing against Washington increasingly fades from the spotlight – even if his outsize persona continues to cast a long shadow over Cuban society and U.S. relations.
There were no announcements of how Castro planned to spend the day, though Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, in Havana for cancer treatment, said via Twitter that he was with his longtime friend and political mentor.
"Here with Fidel, celebrating his 85th birthday! Viva Fidel!" Chavez tweeted.
The previous night two dozen musical acts from across Latin America held a concert in Castro's honor.
"What we say in the songs of our invited artists will be little next to what he deserves," Alfredo Vera, one of the organizers, said late Friday. "Congratulations, beloved and eternal comandante."
… A gregarious public speaker as president, Castro is seen publicly these days in official still photographs and video footage, such as recent images showing him with Raul and Chavez.
… Yet even in retirement, Castro has continued to be a player on the island. Raul has said he consults with his older brother, and some Cuba-watchers say his presence has acted as a brake on reforms that Raul is betting will save the island's economy by loosening some state control.
… In retirement, Castro has been a prolific writer of newspaper columns and a series of books, including autobiographical accounts of the events that led him to take power after the 1959 revolution.
What I noted on Tuesday in relation to the items AP offered subscribers in its email is also true of Orsi's writeup, namely the total lack of any reference to:
Cuba, along with North Korea, provide living proof of a key historical point, namely that state-controlled nations, no matter how comprehensively inefficient and oppressive, don't implode and become democratic on their own. They must be pushed. Remember this the next time some loopy leftist argues that the Soviet Union fell apart on its own, and the words and deeds of Lech Walesa, Ronald Reagan, Lane Kirkland, Pope John Paul II, and Margaret Thatcher had nothing to do with it.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
At The Huffington Post, Canadian "Wikinomics" author Don Tapscott was pitching how public broadcasting in American is both "neutral" and maintains a civil discourse. Has Tapscott actually watched or listened to PBS or NPR? But there he is, crowing about "neutral" NPR:
In the United States, many conservatives seek out right-wing news/advocacy organizations such as Fox News, RushLimbaugh.com or Glenn Beck. Similarly, many liberals increasingly turn to left-of-center sites such as Truthout.org, Alternet.org or TomPaine.com. More and more of these organizations preach to the converted. And on the right, extremism is taking hold, as we just saw with the Tea Party's willingness to jeopardize the country's credit credibility with the world simply to promote its vision of America. To the Tea Party supporters, even neutral organizations such as NPR are now damned as being liberal. What a contrast to 2005, when a Harris poll found that NPR was the most trusted news source in the U.S.
A strong public broadcaster would help maintain a civil public discourse. It would be not-for-profit, with a large part of its budget coming from the federal government. Yes, reliance on public funding runs the risk of the broadcaster becoming a mouthpiece for the government, as is the case, for example, of many countries in the Middle East. But as the CBC and BBC show, with proper precautions this doesn't have to happen. The broadcaster would be accessible everywhere, independent and hire great journalists.
Never buy someone trying to theorize that the right-wingers have their media, and the left-wingers have their media, but public broadcasting is for the broad majority of the masses. In reality, NPR and PBS appeal largely to liberal, Fox News-despising Democrats with high education and high incomes. They are taxpayer-funded broadcasting for snobbish elites. That's why NPR fired Juan Williams for appearing on "The O'Reilly Factor." It's what the NPR audience wanted.
This might explain why Canadian journalist Chrystia Freeland is highlighted in Tapscott's piece touting to a former Treasury Secretary how more socialist countries let their public broadcasters run the public discussion with "various points of view," as if these networks don't also tilt dramatically to favor the left:
Freeland, an adept journalist, asked Rubin if he ever thought about the role a strong public broadcaster could play in the United States. She referenced the role of the CBC in Canada and the BBC in the UK, not in bringing their respective countries together, but by creating a platform whereby various points of view are expressed and reasonable discussions could occur.
The interview became one of Rubin interviewing Freeland on how the public broadcasters work in Canada and the UK and what were their effects on each country. Was it just that a tiny elite that listened to it and watched it or was it broadly accessed by the general population from different communities within the country?
They discussed the difference between the CBC and its impact compared to the U.S.'s National Public Radio, which is listened to by a much smaller and narrower cross-section of the population. At the end, Rubin ended up concluding that a strong public broadcaster like the CBC or BBC could be a simple yet powerful initiative that could help United States get out of its self-destructive mode.
(HT: Dan Gainor)
Openly lesbian NPR arts reporter Neda Ulaby was given the assignment of making light news out of the gay-activism petition to get the Muppet characters Ernie and Bert married on "Sesame Street" on Friday night's All Things Considered. Her only sources for comment were a lesbian comedian and a liberal Time magazine TV critic.
She did not interview the petition's author Lair Scott, who proclaimed: “I started this Change.org petition because I believe we need more media representation of gay and lesbian people in children’s programming,” said Scott. “There are currently no LGBT characters on Sesame Street, nor in any children’s television program.”
NPR somehow couldn't find one American expert (or even citizen on the street) to express that "LGBT characters" are hardly essential to children's television. Instead, Time's James Poniewozik joshed that Bert needs a better man than Ernie:
MELISSA BLOCK, anchor: Now, news from the world of children's television. It's official. The most beloved pair of bachelors on TV are not gay…This week, thousands of people signed an online petition asking for "Sesame Street's" Bert and Ernie to get married, but as NPR's Neda Ulaby reports, PBS has released a statement that says the two are best friends — no more, no less.
NEDA ULABY: The statement was very sweet. It says Bert and Ernie were created to teach preschoolers you can be good friends with people who are very different from you….
JAMES PONIEWOZIK: Honestly, my first reaction to this was that I was glad that they're not making Bert and Ernie a married couple because, frankly, I think Bert can do better.
ULABY: That's Time magazine's TV critic, James Poniewozik.
PONIEWOZIK: Ernie is kind of a jerk to Bert. You know, he tricks him, he lies to him, he steals his pizza. It's not, you know, a loving, adult relationship to me, frankly.
BERT: Ah, Ernie.
PONIEWOZIK: Bert deserves, you know, a nice man who's going to treat him right.
The lesbian comedian wanted Bert and Ernie just to be gay activists:
KATE CLINTON: Somewhere, Jim Henson is laughing, just laughing.
ULABY: Kate Clinton is a lesbian comedian. She says, if we're going to go ahead and project things onto hand puppets, she's going to project Bert and Ernie as being so radical, they're standing up for gay people's freedom to not get married.
CLINTON: You know, like in New York, people are like, before they even say hello, they're like, "are you getting married?" You're like, could you back up?
ULABY: See, this is an important lesson for children. Don't pressure gay people to get married. Obviously, public television needs to tread carefully politically, says James Poniewozik, given its um, history. The network that brought us Tinky Winky also said in its statement that puppets do not have sexual orientation, which as James Poniewozik points out, does not exactly stand up to scrutiny.
PONIEWOZIK: Elmo has a mom, obviously, which does sort of raise the philosophical and biological question of little muppets needing to come from somewhere.
ULABY: But some mysteries are best left unplumbed. The real shame, says Poniewozik, is that parents like him who watch "Sesame Street" with their kids will now be denied that little frisson of, are they or not?
Only liberals get a "frisson" out of wondering if Bert and Ernie might have latent homosexual tendencies.
Greg Pollowitz of National Review's Media Blog expressed the viewpoint of many in his disgust for Newsweek's nasty "Queen of Rage" cover of Michele Bachmann, and attacked the editor as a sleazeball: "In all honesty, Tina Brown, you are an incredible hack and should be ashamed of yourself. Why not just got for the full HuffPo and add nudity to Newsweek’s print edition?"
Apologies to Greg! Tina Brown did exactly that in the Bachmann issue — painted nudity. An appreciation of the recently deceased artist Julian Freud and his "refleshing in meaty paint" was illustrated with a huge two-page sample of a morbidly obese naked woman — titled "Benefits Supervisor Sleeping." (It's also posted on their Daily Beast website — but much smaller.) Turn the page, and the nudity is doubled: an entire page displays a full-frontal self-portrait of Freud standing in the nude as an old man. The idea that Tina's above Arianna's tricks is shot.
Historian Simon Schama concluded his appreciation:
Genital display—his own included—mattered, almost confrontationally. No other artist has made them the heroic center of his nudes, there to be celebrated as much as registered. In 1993, at 71, Freud painted himself nude and full length, with his own penis rendered in densely scumbled paint, right at the optical center. His pose—one arm raised, brandishing a palette knife, and the other hanging loosely, holding the palette—is exactly that of the Apollo Belvedere, the epitome of refined classicism. This is the tradition Freud takes on in his unapologetic arrogance: muscles still hard; an old pair of unlaced boots protecting him from the splintery wood floor, the only sign of vulnerability; brows furrowed in absolute concentration; the sinewy body coiled yet again for painterly attack.
Earlier in the story, Schama vividly described another streak across the canvas:
One of the masterpieces, Naked Portrait II (1980–81), has a sleeping model, so gravid with late pregnancy that her blue-veined breasts seem painfully desperate to lactate, the belly itself protuberant to bursting, and the vagina already opening as if in obedience to oncoming contractions. The morning after the picture was finished she duly gave birth, the painted and fleshly parturitions simultaneously consummated.
Rep. Michele Bachmann has won the first official electoral contest of the 2012 presidential campaign:
Michele Bachmann narrowly won the Iowa straw poll of Republicans on Saturday in the first big test of the 2012 presidential campaign, as Texas Governor Rick Perry formally launched a White House bid that could reshape the race.
Bachmann, a representative from Minnesota, edged out Ron Paul, another representative, and rolled over the rest of the Republican field to capture the nonbinding Iowa mock election, a traditional early gauge of organizational strength in the state that holds the first 2012 nominating contest.
Bachmann won 4,823 votes to Paul's 4,671. Tim Pawlenty, who had focused on a strong showing in the straw poll to rescue his struggling campaign, finished a distant third with 2,293 votes in a bruising setback.
What will it mean for her chances now? And how much will the media step up their attacks on her?
On MSNBC Friday afternoon, openly gay Washington Post editorial writer Jonathan Capehart (while substituting for host Martin Bashir) cited his newspaper competition to mock Gov. Rick Perry’s religious-right stances.
“Timothy Egan has an interesting column in the New York Times,” he insisted, “that pointed out that when Rick Perry prays to God, they tend to not get answered. For example, he prays for rain, they have an extreme drought. He holds prayer services and the markets tank. Is God listening to Rick Perry?”
But that loaded question is nothing compared to Egan’s actual screed on the Opinionator blog on Thursday. Remember before these excerpts that Egan was an "objective" national reporter for the Times for decades. This is your secular-left media elite when it's ready to roar. Egan began by noting Perry offered an official day of prayer to ask for an end to drought:
In the four months since Perry’s request for divine intervention, his state has taken a dramatic turn for the worse. Nearly all of Texas is now in “extreme or exceptional” drought, as classified by federal meteorologists, the worst in Texas history.
Lakes have disappeared. Creeks are phantoms, the caked bottoms littered with rotting, dead fish. Farmers cannot coax a kernel of grain from ground that looks like the skin of an aging elephant.
Is this Rick Perry’s fault, a slap to a man who doesn’t believe that humans can alter the earth’s climate — God messin’ with Texas? No, of course not. God is too busy with the upcoming Cowboys football season and solving the problems that Tony Romo has reading a blitz.
In several places in this column, Egan seems to be mocking not only God or Perry or Republicans, but the entire state of Texas as an ignorant redneck backwater. It continued:
But Perry’s tendency to use prayer as public policy demonstrates, in the midst of a truly painful, wide-ranging and potentially catastrophic crisis in the nation’s second most-populous state, how he would govern if he became president.
“I think it’s time for us to just hand it over to God, and say, ‘God: You’re going to have to fix this,’” he said in a speech in May, explaining how some of the nation’s most serious problems could be solved….
That was a warm-up of sorts for his prayer-fest, 30,000 evangelicals in Houston’s Reliant Stadium on Saturday. From this gathering came a very specific prayer for economic recovery. On the following Monday, the first day God could do anything about it, Wall Street suffered its worst one-day collapse since the 2008 crisis. The Dow sunk by 635 points.
Prayer can be meditative, healing, and humbling. It can also be magical thinking. Given how Perry has said he would govern by outsourcing to the supernatural, it’s worth asking if God is ignoring him.
Or, if you work at The New York Times, you might suggest that God is a harmful fantasy of the delusional, exploited by politicians like the Pied Piper of Hamelin rounding up the rats. But never fear, Egan thinks the entire Republican field is a caucus of crazies:
Though Perry will not officially announce his candidacy until Saturday, he loomed large over the Republican debate Thursday night. With their denial of climate change, basic budget math, and the indisputable fact that most of the nation’s gains have gone overwhelmingly to a wealthy few in the last decade, the candidates form a Crazy Eight caucus. You could power a hay ride on their nutty ideas.
By contrast, Tim Egan must have thought the entire Democratic field four years ago was an awe-inspiring salon of epic geniuses, including Dennis "Department of Peace" Kucinich. We have yet to see Egan wondering if God is ignoring Barack Obama — perhaps because Obama himself was presented as an almost God-like savior.
Egan concluded by hammering Perry as a menacing "Biblical bully" for praying to the Christian God in public, and like a good liberal, says the federal government is much more reliable than that so-called Almighty:
To Jews, Muslims, non-believers and even many Christians, the Biblical bully that is Rick Perry must sound downright menacing, particularly when he gets into religious absolutism. “As a nation, we must call upon Jesus to guide us through unprecedented struggles,” he said last week.
As a lone citizen, he’s free to advocate Jesus-driven public policy imperatives. But coming from someone who wants to govern this great mess of a country with all its beliefs, Perry’s language is an insult to the founding principles of the republic. Substitute Allah or a Hindu God for Jesus and see how that polls.
Perry is from Paint Creek, an unincorporated hamlet in the infinity of the northwest Texas plains. I’ve been there. In wet years, it’s pretty, the birds clacking on Lake Stamford, the cotton high. This year, it’s another sad moonscape in the Lone Star State.
Over the last 15 years, taxpayers have shelled out $232 million in farm subsidies to Haskell County, which includes Paint Creek — a handout to more than 2,500 recipients, better than one out every three residents. God may not always be reliable, but in Perry’s home county, the federal government certainly is.
"I must confess that every time Representative Michele Bachmann uttered the phrase 'as president of the United States' during Thursday's Republican presidential debate I blacked out a little bit, so I'm sure that I missed some things."
So actually began a piece by New York Times columnist Charles Blow Saturday:
But one thing that I didn't miss was the moment when all the candidates raised their hands, confirming that they felt so strongly about not raising taxes that they would all walk away from a hypothetical deficit-reduction deal that was as extreme as 10 parts spending cuts to one part tax increases.
That moment should tell every voter in America everything about this current crop of Know-Nothings — no person who would take such a stance is fit to be president of the United States or any developed country.
Really? Doesn't that make Barack Obama unfit as president?
The first bill passed under his new administration was the stimulus plan. Not one House Republican voted for it.
Did that represent compromise?
Two months later, his 2010 budget passed without one Republican voting for it in either the House or the Senate.
Did that represent compromise?
Seven months after that, his healthcare reform bill passed – on Christmas Eve, mind you! – with only one Republican vote of "Aye."
Did that represent compromise?
The reality is that prior to the Republican victory in November 2010, Barack Obama's entire agenda was largely enacted with the exclusive support of Democrats. There was no grand compromise in this current president until last December's budget agreement.
Such intransigence didn't bother folks like Blow when it was their agenda being forced down the throats of the American people with little to no bipartisan support.
Quite the contrary, the typical complaint from the Left has been that Obama wasn't forceful enough on imposing their wishes on the citizenry irrespective of conservative opinion.
Now that Republicans are finally showing some backbone, people like Blow and his dishonest colleagues are crying foul.
This is of course not surprising, for compromise to a liberal means a conservative giving in to Democrat demands.
Such is never tolerated when it's going the other way.
In the view of the New York Times, everything that ails our nation is caused by Republicans.
Consider Saturday's editorial disgracefully titled "Magical Unrealism: In the Iowa Debate, Republicans Fled From the Truth About the Damage Caused by Their Party":
There was nothing particularly surprising about the shrill skirmishing at the ideological edges of Thursday night's Republican presidential debate in Iowa. What was shocking were the antics in the center.
In full public view, the party's mainstream jumped the tracks of reality on issues of spending and taxes, brightly illustrating the ruinous magical thinking that has led to a downgrade of the nation's credit and invited a double-dip recession. When asked if they would reject a deal to cut the deficit that had 10 times the amount of spending cuts as it had tax increases, the hands of all eight candidates went up. Even a tincture of new revenue, though mixed with huge cuts in government spending, would be too much for the modern Republican Party.
That's correct. It would be too much – for two reasons.
First, what caused last week's downgrade by Standard and Poor's was the runaway spending of Democrats since they took over Congress in 2007 and the White House in 2009. A 41 percent increase in outlays over only four years as the nation is in a recession and thereby experiencing a revenue decline does not engender confidence from credit rating agencies.
A President in the wake of such recklessness offering a budget that further increases debt by almost ten trillion dollars in the next ten years similarly signals to such organizations that the White House doesn't give a rat's bum about the amount of red ink it's racking up. Ditto an entire political Party that for over two years has refused to even bother proposing a budget and has blocked both bills offered and passed by House Republicans that would have prevented a downgrade.
Consider too that if the deficit was actually a concern to the Democrats, they should have incorporated tax hikes into their spending increases.
For years, the Left and their media minions have pointed fingers at former President George W. Bush for starting wars and creating a Medicare prescription drug benefit that weren't "paid for."
The 41 percent explosion in spending since 2007 wasn't "paid for" either, but media outlets weren't at all concerned about such credit card usage when they were applauding the current president and the previous Speaker of the House for doing so.
Now that the bills are coming due, these same people are not only blaming those that voted against all these now failed Keynesian measures, they're also demanding a solution that guarantees such recklessness in the future.
For the GOP to now reward such atrocious behavior by the Democrats by giving them the tax hikes they always want would ensure a repeat of this tragic fiscal nightmare every time the Left wants to "raise revenues."
That the Times ignored all this would be criminal negligence in any other industry, but is now just par for the course in journalistic opinion making.
But also at play here is the devastation that would happen to the GOP if it yielded on this issue.
Today's Republicans remember full well what happened to George H.W. Bush when he went back on his "No New Taxes" campaign pledge.
Any GOP presidential candidate that repeats this mistake will almost definitely not become this Party's nominee, and if the last man – or woman – standing after this process does, fiscally-minded conservatives will stay home next November allowing Democrats to keep the White House and the Senate while possibly winning back the House.
The folks at the Times know this just as much as every candidate standing on that stage in Iowa Thursday evening, and they're going to continue to browbeat Republicans and Tea Partiers into submission on this tax issue until they either cave or a sufficient number of Americans buys into the dishonest claim that the Right really is entirely to blame for this mess.
As proof, consider the next to last sentence in this piece: "The Republican Party has been led into its current cul-de-sac by manipulative officials who would not tell voters the truth about the government's finances."
This coming from a newspaper that has been consistently and deceitfully misleading readers about this nation's budgets for decades.
CBS's Early Show had a strange way of picking guests around the Republican presidential debate on Fox News. On Thursday morning, they interviewed former candidate Steve Forbes about the economy, but had no current candidates. On the day after the debate, CBS brought on Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod to denounce the GOP candidates — but didn't invite any actual GOP candidates.
Correspondent Rebecca Jarvis began by letting Axelrod just launch, but did conclude by asking about how Obama can win considering dissatisfaction among Democrats:
JARVIS: So, I want to start where Norah [O'Donnell] and Chris [Wragge] left off, and is with Rick Perry. He has called the President's job creation record abysmal. Now, he's in the GOP race. What is your reaction to that?
AXELROD: Well, he's also called for secession from the United States of America and all kinds of other things. So, I'm not going to respond specifically to things that Rick Perry has to say. We'll see when he becomes a candidate what specifically he has to propose, what he has to say. His record will get scrutinized, his record on things like education and health care, and some very key issues in Texas. He's been the beneficiary down there of the boom in oil prices, and, obviously, that, in a state like Texas, is going to benefit from that, and increased military spending because of the wars, because Texas is home to many military bases. But-
JARVIS: Do you think that's why that Texas-
AXELROD: His leadership will get — excuse me?
JARVIS [skeptically]: Is that what you attribute, then- Texas's unemployment rate being about a percent lower than the national unemployment rate? To the war and to oil?
AXELROD: Well, I don't think there's any question that those were major contributors to it. I don't think very many people would attribute it to the leadership of the governor down there. But, look, there will be plenty of time for that debate and that back and forth. He isn't a candidate yet. We really don't know what kind of candidate he'll be. We don't know how he'll perform when he gets out there, how he'll answer some of the tough questions facing this country. And so, that will unfold in the days to come.
JARVIS: When you look at what did unfold last night, it's one thing to get slammed by all of the GOP candidates in the running, to say that this president is a one-term president by them. But then, also David, to have the base, the Democratic base, come out against President Obama in such a significant way. How does the President win re-election under these terms?
AXELROD: Well, Rebecca, first of all, let's be clear. Every poll that I've seen, including the most recent this week, show very, very strong support among Democrats for President Obama, almost historically high levels of support. But let's talk about the debate last night, because that's going to help frame this discussion. What we saw- what was surprising was not that all of them attacked Barack Obama, or even that they attacked each other. What was stunning was when they were asked, when you look at the problem of the debt of this country, would you accept any more revenues, any higher taxes, even if it were ten parts cut and one part taxes. And they all raised their hand and said, no, essentially pledging allegiance to the Tea Party, instead of resolving the problems of this country – not one more dime from corporate special interests and loopholes, not one more dime from the wealthiest Americans, just shifting the burden to the middle class.
And on that subject, Rebecca, what was also stunning was, an entire debate, two hours, the two words you never heard from one Republican candidate for president was middle class. They didn't address the problems that are facing people in their lives in this country –
JARVIS: Okay –
AXELROD: And that is what this election is going to be about: who has a vision that's going to move this country forward and restore security for the middle class?
JARVIS: David, we have to end it there. Thanks for being with us this morning. David Axelrod.
